Free Submission by Michel Houellebecq

thing the bottle of butane could explode, we were alone before the mound of charred meat, and the other guests were emptying the bottles of rosé, oblivious. I was relieved to see the storm clouds gathering overhead. When we felt the first drops, wind-driven and icy, we beat a hasty retreat to the living room, where the barbecue turned into a cold buffet. As she sank down into her sofa, glaring at the tabbouleh, I thought about Annelise’s life – and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether ‘stylish’ or ‘sexy’, most likely ‘stylish’ in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner – he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known – had to have known – that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.
    I was one of the last to leave. I even helped Annelise clear up. I had no intention of trying anything with her – which would have been possible. In her situation, anything was possible. I just wanted her to feel a sense of solidarity: solidarity in vain.
     
    Bruno and Annelise must be divorced by now. That’s how it goes nowadays. A century ago, in Huysmans’ time, they would have stayed together, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so unhappy after all. When I got home I poured myself a big glass of wine and plunged back into
En ménage
. I remembered it as one of Huysmans’ best books, and from the first page, even after twenty years, I found my pleasure in reading it was miraculously intact. Never, perhaps, had the tepid happiness of an old couple been so lovingly described: ‘André and Jeanne soon felt nothing but blessed tenderness, maternal satisfaction, at sharing the same bed, at simply lying close together and talking before they turned back to back and went to sleep.’ It was beautiful, but was it realistic? Was it a viable prospect today? Clearly, it was connected with the pleasures of the table: ‘Gourmandise entered their lives as a new interest, brought on by their growing indifference to the flesh, like the passion of priests who, deprived of carnal joys, quiver before delicate viands and old wines.’ Certainly, in an era when a wife bought and peeled the vegetables herself, trimmed the meat and spent hours simmering the stew, a tender and nurturing relationship could take root; the evolution of comestible conditions had caused us to forget this feeling, which, in any case, as Huysmans frankly admits, is a weak substitute for the pleasures of the flesh. In his own life, he never set up house with one of these ‘good little cooks’ whom Baudelaire considered, along with whores, the only kind of wife a writer should have – an especially sensible observation when you consider that a whore can always turn herself into a good little cook over time, that this is even her secret desire, her natural bent. Instead, after a period of ‘debauchery’ (these things being relative), Huysmans turned to the monastic life, and that’s where he and I parted ways. I picked up
En route
, tried to read a few pages, then went back to
En ménage
. I was almost completely lacking in spiritual fibre, which was a shame since the monastic life still existed, unchanged over the centuries. As for the good little cooks, where were they now? In Huysmans’ day they